1. Field of the Invention
The current invention relates to systems and methods for tracking the locations of actors on a movie set, and more specifically but not exclusively, to tracking the locations of the actors based on wirelessly communicative identification tags worn by the actors on the movie set in relation to the scene being recorded.
2. Description of the Related Art
A typical movie set includes at least a camera and one or more actors, referred to herein as “talent.” The term “movie set” as used herein may refer to any equipment and personnel set-up for electronically recording visual content for generating finished motion-picture programs such as, but not limited to, movies, television programs, and commercials. For ease of reference, finished motion-picture programs are generically referred to herein as “films.” In order to produce a film, first, a relatively large amount of visual content is recorded in one or more movie sets. Then, this large amount is pared down to the final cut of the film in an editing process. For some films, it is important to determine, for each actor appearing in the film, the amount of visible on-screen time in the film for the actor.
Past efforts to identify talent within frames of recorded film footage have been done either by relatively labor-intensive human recognition and identification, or by automated facial recognition processing. The former is not entirely foolproof and relies on reliable facial comparison photos, while the computerized facial recognition process requires a sufficient degree of clarity and differentiation to achieve an accurate match. Automated facial recognition has been somewhat successful in news broadcast with full, well-lit headshots, but this is not the case for many motion picture recordings.